U.S. Aide Urges Private Industry To Help Bridge

A Federal transportation official said yesterday that the private sector should help rehabilitate the Williamsburg Bridge because the city had botched its responsibilities and might not be up to the job.

The official, Alfred A. Delli Bovi, a former Republican Assemblyman from Queens who heads the Federal Urban Mass Transportation Administration, toured the closed bridge with Donald J. Trump. Mr. Delli Bovi called the bridge an example of ''municipal failure.''

Mr. Trump, the developer who has publicly feuded with Mayor Koch, said rehabilitating bridge was a challenge he would be pleased to take on if the city would ask him. He also said he would use as much as $250 million of his own money if he got a guarantee of reimbursement with interest.

''I'm willing to do it if they want me - that's my attitude,'' Mr. Trump said.

City officials indicated that such a request was unlikely. No Reason to Turn Over Control

''If any individual wants to contribute to the cost of the bridge he can,'' said the city's Transporation Commissioner, Ross Sandler. He added that he now saw ''no reason to turn control of this bridge over to a private entity.''

Mayor Koch, speaking at a housing rally, said Mr. Trump should donate his time to building affordable housing without profit. ''When he has done that, then we can go on to other things,'' the Mayor said.

State and Federal transportation officials said there would likely be other obstacles to private sector involvement, since contracts using state or Federal money require open, competitive bidding. Mr. Delli Bovi, however, said he believed that those problems could be overcome.

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The Williamsburg Bridge, which spans the East River between the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, was abrubtly closed to subway and vehicular traffic on April 12 after inspectors said it was unsafe. Mr. Sandler and other city officials have conceded that years of inadequate maintenance -primarily cleaning and painting - contributed to making the 85-year-old suspension bridge deteriorate faster than it should have. Bridge Could Reopen in a Week

Yesterday, however, Mr. Sandler said that repair of the deteriorated floor beams - the most immediate problem on the bridge - was proceeding rapidly and that subway traffic might be able to begin as early as April 29. The eight traffic lanes, used by about 160,000 commuters a day, would remain closed. About 84,000 subway commuters used the bridge every day on the BMT's J and M lines before the closing.

Mr. Trump, whose visit to the bridge was heavily promoted by his public relations staff, took over another city project in 1986, completing the long-delayed rehabilitation of the Wollman Rink in Central Park in three-and-a-half months after a six-year, $12-million effort by the city.

He conceded in a telephone interview yesterday that a 1,600-foot-long bridge was somewhat different than a skating rink, but that engineering challenges are one of the attractions of his business.

''I'd never built a skating rink before, and everybody said the same thing then,'' he said. ''It's a level of construction capability that I've always had.''

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A version of this article appears in print on April 22, 1988, on Page B00003 of the National edition with the headline: U.S. Aide Urges Private Industry To Help Bridge. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe